58 ms·
I have no capslock and I must scream
- perihelions 5y agoDoes anyone actually use CapsLock (the functionality*), and if so what for? *(Not counting remapping the physical button to some other, useful, function).
- marginalia_nu 5y agoHonestly, the key wouldn't even be in the story if it wasn't to allude to "I have no mouth..."
- perihelions 5y agoOh, I just got the joke.
- xiaomai 5y agoI swap esc and caps lock, but i use the escape key (for caps-lock) every single day. anytime i'm needing to type a const like REALLY_LONG_VARIABLE.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cryptonector 5y agoAll upper-case and underscores? Sticky keys is for you! Shift-lock >> capslock.
- chrismorgan 5y agoWhy not just hold down one of the Shift keys while typing? That should be faster, considerably once underscores are involved, requiring only slight adjustments to typing technique, to use a ring finger where you would normally use a pinky. (This is a genuine question, because I’m confused why one wouldn’t do it that way—I think it probably never even occurred to me to use Caps Lock for such a purpose, given that the modeless Shift key was right there.)
- notriddle 5y agoI don’t have a disability, but still have Sticky Keys turned on. I also have CapsLock mapped as a second backspace.
- scooble 5y agoI find it mildly uncomfortable to hold shift while typing. And as there is a key for that purpose, which is in the same place on all keyboards, it seems more straightforward for me to use it for its intended purpose rather than something else. I’m not even sure what I would remap it to.
- Czarcasm 5y agoI'm a mechanical engineer, and ASME Y14.5 (the leading drafting standard in the west) requires the use of all capitol letters for technical drawings. Because of this, I use the CapsLock key very very frequently. Removing the CapsLock key would piss off a lot of people in the hardware engineering world.
- chrismorgan 5y agoIf lowercase letters aren’t permitted at all, then surely your technical drawing app would just shift everything to uppercase automatically (or at least provide an option to do so)?
- cryptonector 5y agoIf you work with Kerberos, you might. Kerberos realm names are DNS-like, but up-cased. So the realm for news.ycombinator.com might be NEWS.YCOMBINATOR.COM or YCOMBINATOR.COM. Normally I would just lock shift (sticky keys rock), but '.' happens in realm names, and shifting it isn't useful, so I use capslock for that. That's about the only time I use capslock. Otherwise it's sticky keys all the way.
- roryokane 5y agoI use Caps Lock for typing any acronym of four or more letters, and for typing some three-letter acronyms. Examples: “Execute this SQL against the ‘XYZ_DB’ PostgreSQL database.” “When I requested the HTML file over HTTP, I saw a CAPTCHA.”
- probably_wrong 5y agoI do. I typically have plenty of constants with descriptive names, and typing DESCRIPTIVE_NAME with a single hand is annoying. As a side note I noticed that some keyboards implement CapsLock wrong: when CapsLock is on, pressing "9" should generate "9" and not ")". Otherwise it would be called ShiftLock, which is a lot less useful.
- klez 5y agoWhat keyboard is that, so I know to NEVER buy it?
- probably_wrong 5y agoRight now I have this issue with a Logitech G105. But I know it's not the only one.
- IYasha 5y agoNot as often as Shift, but yes, I use it for its purpose.
- pezezin 5y agoIf I could remove a key from a full keyboard, it would be Num lock. Why does it exist? I can't think of any situation where you have a full num pad and don't want to use it.
- 8ytecoder 5y agoHaven't used it in a really really long time but I used to disable num lock and use it as arrow keys for games.
- makeitdouble 5y agoI’m pretty happy we kept a ton of “dead” keys as they offer a flurry of options for more modifiers and shortcuts. The same way most people probably only use one of the Shift key, one of the Cmd key, etc. but it would be a shame to remove them. I’d see Num lock under the same light. I went with Apple’s “international” layout just to have more keys to map.
- ordu 5y agoI use it to check does OS kernel respond to a keyboard. When kernel is dead LED wouldn't switch state. I cannot use CapsLock, because I have no, I remapped it to a compose. I cannot use ScrollLock LED, because it reflects a chosen keyboard layout, and I believe it needs more than just healthy kernel to switch LED. But I never messed with NumLock, because I see no reason. I'd remove Insert key. I regularly hit it by accident and I see no reason for insert-mode to exist except to annoy me.
- rusanu 5y agoThis article describes perfectly the Netflix catalog...
- samschooler 5y agoRelevant bash.org: http://www.bash.org/?835030 http://www.bash.org/?835030
- akvadrako 5y agoThe most useless button (on average) in the world.
- ghaff 5y agoEspecially given that, if you have some use case that requires it on a regular basis, there are a number of ways to programmatically simulate it.
- 2muchcoffeeman 5y agoIf the simulation is shoddy it’s even more infuriating though. On MacOS if I remap a key, it gets remapped for everything. I suppose the remapping is done before applications get the keystroke. Even if I connect to a remote computer, it’s getting the remapped keystroke. On Linux, it’s just locally. On a remote system, the original keystroke is passed. The only way to get around that is with a programmable keyboard. But then your laptop keyboard doesn’t work the way you expect.
- ghaff 5y agoFair enough. Although I (and I assume most others) have a big key on my MacBook that I hit way more often by accident than I actually use.
- quacked 5y agoThis is exactly how it feels with every iteration of my company's new design. Let's disappear scroll bars! Let's hide the menu! Let's order sub-menus by frequency of use, rather than by alphabetical order! Let's get rid of border lines around text entry boxes! Let's make clickable and non-clickable text the same font, style, and color! Let's-- I do not understand why designers are so insistent on making tools so difficult and unpleasant to use.
- mitchdoogle 5y agoFrequency of use seems like a better metric than alphabetical order. The order of the alphabet is arbitrary. Besides, I think this is fairly normal - I just had a look at all the applications I have open now and not one has submenus in alphabetical order
- tartoran 5y agoDon’t be surprised. They’re brewing dark patterns.
- quacked 5y agoI don't disagree with you in the slightest for most other software tools, but this is an internal tool that we're selling so that people can build their own applications. There's no advertising--in fact, the fewer seconds people spend inside the application, the better it is for our bottom line because it means we can pump out the applications faster.
- brimble 5y agoI think there are a few related causes behind this behavior: 1) Visual changes show better than feature lists. I'm not convinced this matters anywhere near as much for customers as marketing folks seem to think it does, but marketing values it regardless, management values it (it'll show better to their bosses, too), and product managers, designers, and front-end developers value it (so they have nice-looking things for portfolios and presentations, both internal and external) 2) Making something that looks good in a screenshot or demo is not the same thing as making something that works well (that is, has "good UX"), and making something that does both well is hard enough that the talent (and environment/budget) to do it may be fairly rare. The former matters to those concerned about point 1, so that's what gets priority (which is why so many redesigns are neutral, at best, as far as UX, and many are worse). 3) If design is done well, it's heavily cyclical. Design guidelines and languages and component libraries and such should be built up such that most design work only happens when there are initial designs, very large feature add-ons that break with what the previous design guidelines can accommodate, or redesigns. So, if you're a designer and want to stay comfortably employed, and you're a manager who doesn't want to surrender head-count or lose your people to other projects, and a large part of the org has various incentives to push initiatives that result in something nice to to look at (see 1, again) what happens? Lots more redesigns than need to happen. LOTS more. [EDIT] And all this is before we even consider possible business reasons to deliberately make the product worse, which are also A Thing.
- gombosg 5y agoI mapped it to the ctrl key. Very convenient!
- popotamonga 5y agoprograming for 30+ years and never once used it, just hold shift for the rare cases i need uppercase. Can it be disabled on windows?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tablespoon 5y ago> programing for 30+ years and never once used it, just hold shift for the rare cases i need uppercase. The article is not really about the caps lock key.
- int_19h 5y agohttps://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Map_caps_lock_to_escape_in_Windows https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Map_caps_lock_to_escape_in_Windo... Keyboard Manager in Microsoft PowerToys is probably the most straightforward.
- pessimizer 5y agoMake it into a compose key: https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose
- int_19h 5y agoThe link at the end that (I assume) prompted this write-up: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1687635 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1687635 (Speaking as someone whose native language is non-Latin-based, I think it was a very bad idea. Worse still is their attitude that if some website becomes unusable, "just file a bug".)
- tablespoon 5y ago> I think it was a very bad idea. Worse still is their attitude that if some website becomes unusable, "just file a bug".) Mozilla is run by one of the most inept group of designers, who seem committed to killing off the last non-Chrome browser. You know what feature they need to remove? Telemetry. Their telemetry must show that practically zero of their users actually use the collected telemetry, and Mozilla itself can't seem to avoid using the "data" to make bad decisions.
- chrisseaton 5y ago> the last non-Chrome browser Safari is still huge.
- donatj 5y agoChrome was based on WebKit, Safaris codebase. They’re still very close cousins despite Chrome hard forking to Blink about 8 years ago. WebKit it’s was a fork of KHTML
- chrisseaton 5y agoThe common part is WebKit - you can say they're both WebKit, but not that they're both Chrome.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 5y ago
- roywiggins 5y agoApple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
- 542458 5y agoI mean… they did, and called it an iPad. And they’ve sold 350 million of them so far, so it seems like it was a decent idea.
- folmar 5y agoBut that was not "revolutionary new", there were tablets previously.
- dymk 5y agoHow popular were tablets before the iPad?
- folmar 5y agoIt depends on how long before you look. In 1990s they were fairly popular as the smaller devices were expensive and small screens were hard on the users and custom development was not as easy, so field data entry was often with some b&w tablet, often connected to a portable printer and other accessories.
- ricardobeat 5y agoTechnically yes, but in practice no. The previous products were extremely expensive, keyboard-wielding niche products which were extremely hard to come by. The iPad was the first viable commercial product, with multitouch, Wi-Fi, and a friendly OS. I bought one right after release in 2010, at the time Android was in its infancy, most people had a flip phone and I’d never actually seen a tablet in any form before (other than the iPod touch a few months earlier). It was mind blowing. Also, revolutionary != new. Apple rarely is the first to enter a new market.
- upwardbound 5y agoThe title is a reference to this story by Harlan Ellison, which won a Hugo award in 1968: [NSFW - contains graphic descriptions of torture and other severe violence] https://wjccschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/01/I-Have-No-Mouth-But-I-Must-Scream-by-Harlan-Ellison.pdf https://wjccschools.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/01/I...
- NortySpock 5y agoIf I recall the story plot points correctly, you should probably have a Not Safe For Work tag on it. (content warnings: sexual assault, murder-suicide, torture)
- upwardbound 5y agogood idea and you're correct. Will do
- capableweb 5y agoHow can text be NSFW? No one except you would know the actual context and longer story but you, so unless there are words like "PENIS INTO VAGINA" with big letters, I don't see how any plaintext can be NSFW.
- bombcar 5y agoWork filters may trigger on phrases, so it's not like someone would see it walking by, but it might be flagged for review. If the page flagged is some thread on HN nobody cares, but maybe if it isn't ... But in reality it's just a common short-hand content warning, similar to [PDF] right before a URL that ends in .pdf.
- mwid 5y agoHow could company filters trigger on phrases within a webpage if TLS is used? Would they have to bug the browser itself somehow instead?
- tobyhinloopen 5y agoaaa aaaaa a aaa a aaa aaaaaa aa aaaaaaa aaa aaaaa aaaaaaaaaaa aaa
- marginalia_nu 5y agoDebated linking to <https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AAAAAAAAA! https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/AAAAAAAAA!>
- unfocussed_mike 5y agoWhen there is an applicable uncyclopedia link, there is no debate. You must.
- cryptonector 5y agoHad to check the history. Sad not to see marginalia_nu show up obviously.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoThat page is an antique. I think it may be old enough to drive a car in some jurisdictions.
- the_af 5y ago> Computers now instantly boot up when plugged into the wall, and run until the plug is pulled. So, like my beloved C64 then? I'm all for it.
- bombcar 5y agoThis one actually almost works, especially since you can shut down via software (and Apple has almost removed the power button anyway).
- jandrese 5y agoWe got some new Dell Laptops at work and they are configured to power on when you open the lid. There is a fingerprint sensor that I think is maybe supposed to be a power button, but it doesn't seem to work as a power button. Twice now the laptops have locked up (black screen, keyboard doesn't light up, etc...) and the old trick of holding the power button down for 10 seconds to hard power it off doesn't work. You have to disassemble the thing and unplug the batteries to get it to power off. Then it powers back on when you plug it back in and open the lid.
- bombcar 5y agoAt least Apple's fingerprint/powerbutton key works correctly when held down for 10s. I can't believe there's not a way - oh wait, it's Dell of COURSE it'd be a bad copy of an ill-advised Apple feature.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- clysm 5y agoThere's always a non-software (hardware) fallback for powering off. The option to force a power-off using a multi-second hold is done purely in hardware. It must always be there for service and safety.
- jsnell 5y agoWhile it's an amusing story, it feels like the analogue doesn't really work. In reality low value options are removed because few users use it. In the story options (keys) are being removed even when used by absolutely everybody, as long as the relative frequency of the key is low. That's a huge difference. And of course you don't evaluate an experiment to remove an option like in the story, by looking at before/after rates on how often the option is triggered. It's e.g. pretty clearly not what happened in the the Firefox encoding menu example that motivated the rant.
- clysm 5y ago> In reality low value options are removed because few users use it. Should accessibility options go away as well because few users use it? The underlying point (even if not conveyed through the best analogy) is that there are critical features that must exist regardless of what telemetry says.
- marginalia_nu 5y agoHonestly this was really just a low effort joke to vent my frustration, not intended to be fair or convincing. Anyway, the point is more subtle than that. Whether a feature is used is as much a function of the overall design as much as the feature's usefulness. If you hide a feature away or make it awkward to access, then it will see less use. Sometimes an infrequently used feature can aid a more frequently used feature to work more smoothly.
- shaky-carrousel 5y agoAh, looks like Steve and Bob are former Firefox developers.
- austinl 5y agoVery similar to A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by M. J. Shields (frequently misattributed to Mark Twain): "For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld."
- garfieldnate 5y agoI like historical spellings because they tell the story of the development of the language; even though it can be pretty chaotic and tough to master, the chaos itself has a certain charm (for me) in demonstrating how how one of our oldest technologies lives and evolves in the minds of the human beings that use it. Besides that, though, I don't like the Shields proposal because it's specific to his dialect. No "r" in "letez" and using an "a" in "jast" for instance makes this difficult for me to read.
- thematrixturtle 5y agoExcept that Twain's spelling system would actually be a vast improvement on what we have today.
- Semiapies 5y agoRight. It's basically because of the aggressively anti-phonetic nature of English orthography that phonetic spellings look "wrong" or "stupid" to us.
- cercatrova 5y agoThat's funny because I remap caps lock to esc, primarily for vim but also because caps lock is just never used in my experience.
- petepete 5y agoI use a HHKB mainly because it has a correctly positioned control key. I wish other companies would make them this way too - caps lock just isn't useful.
- cole-k 5y agoGenuine question: have you had problems with software remapping before? I discovered the joys of control-in-place-of-caps-lock when I bought an HHKB, but I got it because I liked it as a keyboard. Since then I've had no trouble converting caps-lock into control with other keyboards. If you don't mind an unrelated anecdote, while I got used to the diamond-shaped arrow keys of the HHKB, I kind of wish they would have been hjkl or just on the keyboard itself. I find that I still need to use arrow keys too much for that layout to be comfortable.
- petepete 5y agoI have no real problem with remapping, I do it on my ThinkPad for when I'm not at my desk. Really it boils down to the fact that I dislike the capslock key taking up valuable real estate. From my perspective has no real use, I never type more than the odd word in caps. I want to reward companies who omit it in the hope more will follow. I use vim so hjkl are natural to me, but I got used to the diamond in short order and don't have any issues switching between them.
- phonepostingsux 5y ago> I want to reward companies who omit it in the hope more will follow. Let's hope not, I really like my comfortable ectra escape key. The pictures I saw when quickly searching for HHKB looked incomplete to me, control is fine in the corner! Hopefully we'll have all options though, a comfortable keyboard is a must.
- dredmorbius 5y agoData driven design: stack-rank for features.
- cryptonector 5y agoSo... blame Ballmer, yes?
- dredmorbius 5y agoNot sure where the idea originated. It's just ... deeply flawed. (Both SR and DDD.)
- vymague 5y agoIt reminds me every time I asked why a website does a weird thing, the answer was always be "we have done A/B testing".
- bombcar 5y agoI recall reading somewhere that basically everyone does A/B testing absolutely wrong, which means it ends up being "coincidentally" always picking what the team wanted to pick anyway.
- itisit 5y agoMy left pinky has been most grateful that I mapped my caps lock key to ctrl many, many years ago.
- silverpepsi 5y agoIn my opinion this was already done with the nightmare that have been the function keys in laptops for three decades I use F2 and F6 and screen contrast buttons every single day. And the FN lock is used just infrequently enough that there is ZERO possiblity I will remember its state at any given moment, especially considering reboots or sleeps that may toggle it. And I use it just enough that it isn't worth spending 5 seconds to move my hands away to figure out its state, consequently every single time I hit an FN key I get an undesired result from pressing it. For the love of god we are talking about adding 12 keys to the keyboard, they can be half-height, or simply making the FN lock into a shift function with no lock capability to GUARANTEE determinist results when pressing a key and the lock is in an unknown state. Can we please start a petition.
- Tijdreiziger 5y agoI had to look up 'Fn lock' -- apparently you can hit Fn + Esc on some laptops to 'lock' the Fn function on? I've honestly never used this in my life. Can't your problem be solved by simply never engaging the Fn lock?
- dalmo3 5y agoSome keyboards, like the Microsoft Sculpt which I use, have no Fn key, only Fn lock. I just gave up using the media keys at all.
- Tijdreiziger 5y agoWow, I just looked up a photo of this keyboard and it's actually a physical switch, not even a key. What an odd design decision. Actually, the keyboard layout looks pretty odd in general. I could forgive the Insert key (maybe there actually exist people who use it), but is there anyone who needs dedicated Scroll Lock and Pause keys? edit: actually, I guess Excel power users might use Scroll Lock? It still looks like a pretty odd layout to me regardless.
- silverpepsi 5y ago
- thriftwy 5y agoЗдравствуйте, Мартин Алексеевич!
- unnouinceput 5y agoThis reminds me of those AI's at Facebook? who did exactly this before they were plugged off. I've read about it right here on HN circa a year or so.
- tpoacher 5y agoThat link to Symptomless Coma though ... yikes. Way to put the article starkly into perspective. (PS. I read this in gemini. Thank you!)
- marginalia_nu 5y agoJam is very dark, but also undeniably brilliant.
- Findecanor 5y agoIt get scary when you consider how many non-UI decisions there have been out in the real world that have been caused by the same kind of thinking.
- makeitdouble 5y agoTBF things come and go. Imagine a world where nothing ever disappears whatever the usage patterns are. Would you wish for you gas car engine to have kept a cranking port, as after all the battery could die and it’s more options that plugging a booster, right ?
- bombcar 5y agoAmusingly in reference to the original discussion, see catb's glossary: http://catb.org/jargon/html/M/mojibake.html http://catb.org/jargon/html/M/mojibake.html On Safari this is mangled until I force the encoding to Western (ISO Latin 1) - Chrome and Firefox leave it as is.
- alecbz 5y agoSomething something slippery slope. I mean look, if you believe in abstractions at all, then sometimes (or always) interfaces need to hide things. Interfaces can be made too small for sure, but without a more principled argument on why any particular change is going too far, it seems way too easy to say "oh no someone made an interface smaller, the end is nigh!" Though to be fair I guess the author's point is maybe that the arguments in the bug report are also insufficient if they could also be used to remove critical components. I'm not sure how much I agree with that, but I only glanced at the actual bug report.
- emeraldd 5y agoThe answer should have been morse.
- frob 5y agoTo be fair, I banished capslock from my keyboard in favor of ctrl 17 years ago and haven't looked back.
- fargle 5y agoawesome article! I still remember switching back and forth from sun (and other unix) keyboards - ctrl and caps lock are reversed from today's standard 104. I haven't used the caps-lock since then. Pinky just goes on the shift key TO TYPE ALL SHOUTY. I don't really know if pinky ever gets used fro letters in any case, but I think he doesn't so unless you need capital ctrl- something what's the problem? Still it does also feel like the problem of designers that like to use the tail to wag the dog to justify yet another unnecessary change is just all too realistic.
- sidpatil 5y agoYou might enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BnLbv6QYcA
- roryokane 5y agoThis is a link to the video “Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard”, which was already linked in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30421855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30421855
- sam0x17 5y agoI usually surgically disable my CAPS lock in registry or firmware settings -- most annoying mis-click ever for me -- I just hold down shift if I need to
- suzzer99 5y agoI always did the same with the Insert key on windows. Totally useless and misclick hell.
- Nition 5y agoThe Alcatel One Touch Max DB[0] could receive SMS messages in upper and lowercase, but could only send in uppercase. I read through the whole manual at the time and there was nothing about it. Fond memories of always seeming like I was shouting at people in replies. [0]https://www.gsmarena.com/alcatel_ot_max_db-27.php https://www.gsmarena.com/alcatel_ot_max_db-27.php
- block_dagger 5y agoNice Harlan Ellison reference
- smoyer 5y agoI type on ErgoDox Infinity keyboards and I don't have a caps-lock. It was a bit irritating so I switched from Java to Go to avoid capitalized constants and I'm happy again!
- michaelsalim 5y agoI see some comments of remapping the caps lock into ctrl. Not much benefit IMO. I'd recommend to trying out backspace instead. Why? It removes the need to move your right hand off the mouse if you need to delete anything. For example: double click a word and backspace with left hand. Especially handy for programming. Definitely one i can't live without now.
- wy35 5y agoAnd statistically, backspace is the second most used key (after the spacebar). I don’t understand why people remap caps-lock to control when it’s much closer to the hand than backspace and it’s much, MUCH less frequently used.
- shanth 5y agobecause position of ctrl on Apple keyboards are in much weirdo position than Backspace that remap caps-lock to ctrl is less painful ?
- wy35 5y agoMy main machine is a Macbook Pro and I find the control key to be in a fine position. Just curl the pinky down two rows. Backspace is much farther away.
- Phrodo_00 5y agoPeople building custom keyboards do choose to remove some keys. Here are some examples: https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/sxaxe0/the_koibloom_40/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/sxaxe0... https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/sf5hot/dsa_ppw_is_cheating/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/sf5hot... https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/sb5jf4/first_build_handwired_20_19231_with_cloud_lighting/ https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/sb5jf4...
- Stevvo 5y agoThey look to closer to artwork than practical input devices. I doubt they get much use.
- xboxnolifes 5y agoThe examples given are pretty extreme (except the first one), but 40% and 60% keyboard are common for keyboard enthusiasts.
- blululu 5y agoThis is cute but it refuses to actually think about the problem of keyboard layout design. Take the reductio the other way and you end up adding keys to create a keyboard with a key for “the” and one for “and”, “or”, “but”, “of”... The author is just saying they want the QWERTY keyboard exactly as it is without actually thinking how this layout got there in the first place. The Caps Lock key makes no sense in the context of a computer keyboard. Back in the days of typewriters when everything was a single monospaced font, typing in all caps was the only way to make something bold (there weren’t italics, bold, font sizes or different fonts). Having a convenient way to hold down the shift key was nice in this context. In the context of a computer keyboard that has multiple fonts, sizes and weights, it is a dumb key. Larry Tesler’s dictum “no modes” is immediately applicable. Steve Jobs tried to get rid of the caps lock key twice (once at Apple and once at Next). Google’s pixel books have replaced it with a search shortcut, which is not that useful but much better than having a key whose primary function is to mess up password entry and shout online without any extra effort for shouting. On a Mac keyboard there are a few common substitutions for caps lock that you can use. Any of these substitutions are preferable (I have it as Option for tab navigation but any of the other main hot keys make a better use of keyboard real estate).
- tsimionescu 5y agoCapsLock is extremely useful in programming, where CONSTANT_NAME is the most common convention for names of constants.
- electroly 5y agoHolding down shift is not really a problem for constant names since you need it for the underscores anyway. You can type CONSTANT_NAME without lifting the shift key but with caps lock you still need to use shift anyway.
- tsimionescu 5y agoYou can't "hold down" shift when writing CONSTANT_NAME if you're doing any kind of touch typing. You constantly have to switch between pressing left shift or right shift, so basically you're writing 13 key-combinations. With caps lock, you only need to use a key combination once (for _), instead of 13 times without.
- jbuhbjlnjbn 5y agoI have no del key and I must scream (apple keyboard)
- aidenn0 5y agoI haven't used a Mac for a while, but, IIRC, one of the modifier keys (Fn, Cmd, Opt?) turns the "delete" key into an actual delete.
- dmart 5y agoFn-delete, yes. Honestly I find this nicer than using a separate key (which also exists on the larger Apple keyboards with numpads), but to each their own.
- suzzer99 5y agoFunny you should mention that in this thread. You can map caps lock to forward delete. Trust me it will change your life.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ShoveItHN 5y ago
- IncRnd 5y agoWell... All of my keyboards have their capslocks keys remapped as escape. There literally hasn't been a capslock key on any of my keyboards for years. This has been a great boon to how I type. Originally, I remapped the keys this way due to my macbook's touchbar that removed a functional escape key. The frequency is far higher for me to use escape than capslock, which I realized that I actually never used. When I need capitalization, I use the shift key.
- suzzer99 5y agoI re-mapped caps lock to forward delete on my Mac. Changed my life.
- lasercat 5y agoIf you enjoyed reading this, you may also appreciate the novel Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn. As letters are banned in the story, they also are omitted in subsequent chapters.
- mmmBacon 5y agoHonestly why does a foldable display seem like a good idea? It’s not. It’s crap. If you have any understanding of hardware whatsoever you’ll be able to devine why a foldable screen is going to fail in about 5 seconds and therefore is a bad idea. On the face of it, foldable screens seem awesome. Like the future. Only problem is that they are still the future.
- selcuka 5y ago> Computers now instantly boot up when plugged into the wall, and run until the plug is pulled. No more start-up time, the cases are aesthetically cleaner, and manufacturing cost is down at least a fraction of a dollar. This is not futuristic, but actually retro. Some older computers (i.e. Sinclair ZX Spectrum) didn't have a power button at all.
- deathanatos 5y agoCaps Lock is a genuinely useless key: two-shift caps lock is a feature (on some OSes) whereby hitting both shifts toggles caps lock. You can free up that keycap for a brighter future, but still have your caps-lock functionality for when you need to scream at some identifiers.
- bullen 5y agoI discovered that if you limit yourself to a-z and 1-6 you can put 6 letter usernames into an 32-bit integer with 2 bits to spare. And that gives you 1 billion combinations, sure most of them are garbage but still. http://fuse.rupy.se http://fuse.rupy.se uses it to test it...
- bullen 5y agoI call this base-32 and it uses 5-bit. I'm considering using it for my distriuted DNS 2.0... 6-bit would only give you 5 character names but with 0-9 and A-Z if you wished (although that is really confusing for names...)
- IYasha 5y agoI have no words and I must comment.
- ringer 5y agoThe perfect keyboard already exists[1] and it also has a caps lock key[2]. [1] https://github.com/dkter/aaaaa https://github.com/dkter/aaaaa [2] https://github.com/dkter/aaaaa/pull/13 https://github.com/dkter/aaaaa/pull/13
- ncmncm 5y agoUnfortunate title. I would be much happier if the capslock didn't. I have never, ever wanted to use capslock, and on e.g. livecds it is a big nuisance to need to fix it (CapsLock -> Ctrl) on every boot-up. I curse the person who put the by-far least useful function on one of the most accessible keys, and bunged Ctrl down where it is out of easy reach. A pox on them!
- hooby 5y agoNow I want a T-Shirt with "I have no capslock and I must scream!" written on it!
- myfonj 5y agoObligatory "Chicken" strip from The Parking Lot is Full (PLIF), 1996-03-15 [0] [0] http://j.aufbix.org/plif/archive/wc072.gif http://j.aufbix.org/plif/archive/wc072.gif
- eterevsky 5y agoI have no capslock and I must type a constant name IN_ALL_CAPS.
- trasz 5y agoThat's why one of the fundamental tenets of Open Source is "scratch your own itch". Good software gets built by people who actually use it.
- Dah00n 5y agoIs this a joke or a leaked internal Apple discussion? I can't tell.
- ho_schi 5y agoReminds me of ThinkPads old good seven row keyboard and the new six (DISASTER) row keyboard and a lot of changes from Apple with th Touchbar (++DISASTER). Where is my context menu key? Why Fn+F4 doesn't suspend the machine anymore. Who regrouped the keys in this bad layout (Six Row Disaster). Somebody didn't understand the difference between clean design and useful design?
- pksebben 5y agoI realize this is a more nuanced take on metric analysis, but the title just makes me remember that before I remapped caps lock, my most frequent use of it was to turn it back off when it had been accidentally pressed.
- HenriTEL 5y agoAt the end humans are native machine speakers.
- grogers 5y agoI'm too lazy to deal with remapping it, so I typically pry the caps lock key off my keyboards. My kids always say that my keyboard is broken and try to fix it...
- prepend 5y agoThat’s interesting to me as to your motivation for doing this. Do you just hate seeing the caps lock key? Wouldn’t it be easier just not to use it? If your problem is accidentally tapping it, wouldn’t that still happen with the key pried off?
- lproven 5y agoHint, folks. The post is not about keyboards. It's not about typing or any other form of text entry, either.
- WulfBeo 5y ago
- WulfOfGhost 5y ago
- Hichm 5y agoIf you had the power to change someone's life for the better and make them happy (and you had it), would you do it?
- WulfOfGhost 5y ago
- kailobobo 5y ago
- kailobobo1 5y ago
- kailobobo12 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- a1233 5y ago
- joshuarubin 5y agoI have no CamelCase key and I must write variables
- NPC69420 5y ago
- NPC69420 5y ago